School Districts and Student Achievement in British Columbia: A Preliminary Analysis
Keywords:
school districts, student achievement, mathematics, socioeconomic statusAbstract
The recent emphasis in process-product studies on school effectiveness has largely ignored the school district context within which schools operate. This paper examines the hypothesis that, in British Columbia, when variables measuring SES, district resources, and basic district characteristics are controlled, no significant differences between aggregated student achievement will remain to be explained.
A series of stable measures of family background and of district resources and characteristics is used in correlational analyses with mathematics achievement as the outcome measure. These data and analyses suggest several conclusions: that districts are quite significant sources of achievement variation, that resources and achievement are negatively related, and that a substantial amount of achievement variance between districts is not accounted for by any of the measures used here. Speculatively, the paper proposes a district ethos paralleling findings at the school level, but this would have to be identified via qualitative research.
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